Linux

Yes, if you don't have a computer that literally came out this year, don't have 2 separate graphics cards and don't need HDR, or specific Windows-only software, Linux generally just works.

In my experience the VAST majority of people that say things are hard on Linux have never actually tried it ...

Same with people that complain cats are not LoYAl lIkE DOgS... They have never had cats

I’ve used linux for twelve years and am still surprised at how easy some things are, not that things were really even that hard before. The improvements to gaming on Linux are pretty well known now, but even things like recording audio are dead simple now. Outside of the super expensive DAWs, I’d say linux is on par with Mac and windows now, especially with things like yabridge.

The moment that shocked me was when printers, network cards, and even motherboard integrated Ethernet didn't work on Windows without driver downloads but Linux was plug and play. Full reversal of the situation.

you shouldn't need to disable tpm

We may need a new forum: when Google is RIGHT about a search.

You've given me some interest in Endeavor. My current installation won't hibernate & restore.

Yeah I had an MSI gaming laptop that had a lot of proprietary stuff that was a pain to setup. Everything from display brightness to volume to internet to keyboard lights to headphone jack took special workarounds to setup. This was in 2018 and Ubuntu 18.04. Then 19.04 rolled out, and I didn't have to do the speaker workaround anymore. 19.10 rolled out, and i didn't have to do the keyboard lights workaround. This way, little by little, every Linux kernel upgrade added one or another of the components, and after a couple of years, everything on that laptop worked out of the box. That's when I was truly impressed by Linux.

I've used Linux since the mid 00's and, well, I've seen some shit. But nowadays? It's the best desktop OS I've used. I recently had to start using a Mac for work and realized just how far DE's like Gnome and KDE have gotten. It feels like I have to fight MacOS every single day to get it to do the absolute basics, the things that Gnome and KDE does out of the box. And the most ridiculous thing is that the app ecosystem for MacOS is so heavily focused on monetization that if you purchase enough apps to customize the MacOS DE to an acceptable level, you'd likely have spent enough money to buy another laptop. Madness.

TL;DR: Turns out that this year is actually the year of Linux on the desktop!

No surprise it feels a lot snappier. You only run the shit you have purposefully installed, and not endless layers of telemetry, candy crush silent installs, game bars that somehow make the performance worse, and mandatory online service accounts

Linux is boring. In a good way. It is so boring that each of my computers use different distros. I have Debian, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Endeavour OS installed across 4 or 5 computers right now. Some of them still dual-booting Windows 10/11. Now each time I boot into Windows is fun. In a bad way.

Yes it literally has come a long way, all the way from 1991 to 2024, I think the only other OS that has managed that is Windows.
I know that's not quite what you meant, it was just a thought I came to think of reading the headline.

But apart from that, it's also become quite good, but IMO it has been for more than a decade now.

When you say that the keyboard works: do the brightnesss, mute and volume controls do what they're supposed to do?

HP laptops--at least business-grade ones--are notorious for sending nonstandard scan codes and requiring custom drivers.

It really has come a long way since the old times.

Hibernate works

Yah, I'm not buying that.

This has been my experience since 2009 :) I've been using Linux for 15 years now, across four laptops and two desktop PCs, and I've only had a few rare hardware issues. (Sleep not working properly, BIOS update overwriting GRUB, and Wacom tablet mapping needing to be fixed. That's it.)

The hardest part is almost always the installation, and that's almost always attributable to Microsoft Bullshit.

I'm happy you're having a good time :)

EndeavourOS has been a wonderful experience for me, can't recommend it enough.

Secure boot is still problematic, but it has also become much easier thanks to sbctl; in the best case you only have to delete the keys in the bios and run 3 or 4 generic commands.

Installing Linux is really easy these days.

Did you get your audio volume fixed? My ThinkPad is so quiet on Linux (Silverblue) that it's hard to use it for anything with media.

Funny enough, I also flashed my (probably much older) HP Spectre X360 to endevourOS last week, works good, feels more responsive then PopOS was on it.

I then tried Bazzite on my desktop and the experience went much worse, seemingly because of Nvidia driver support still being pretty bad on linux. Oh well.

EndeavourOS is easy to install but unclear how to maintain.

• Don’t use GUI package managers, but here, have some GUI package managers.
• pacman, pacdiff, yay, eos, AUR??? The Complete Idiots Guide did not clear things up for me, either. AFAICT they made something more confusing than Arch, not less.